Dollars for Development

Joan Vandervelde, the director of online professional development at the University of Northern Iowa (UNI) in Cedar Falls, says that NCLB is forcing schools to think more seriously about professional development. "Before last year, deciding which courses to offer [in a particular school or district] was haphazard and often wasn't focused on a school building's goals," she says. Now, with the government's emphasis on well-trained, certified teachers, Vandervelde says that educators are paying a lot more attention to creating individualized professional development plans. Her own state, for example, along with Indiana and Montana have established statewide standards for professional development, and Vandervelde says that's a great way to encourage often-reluctant or budget-strapped superintendents and principals to take online professional development seriously.

UNI, for example, offers teachers needing staff-development credit a popular online children's literature course taught by Sharon McElmeel, a former school librarian who is now a children's literature consultant. As part of the rigorous course, educators are required to take part in an online discussion group, submitting at least three e-mail replies a week. Online professional development courses have some built-in benefits, says McElmeel, especially for those who are tongue-tied. "Students who might rarely or never speak up in a classroom speak up here because if they don't, they're invisible," she says. "If they don't, it's like they're not in the class at all."

While in the past, media specialists and other teachers could satisfy professional development requirements by simply coasting through a one-time-only workshop that had little relevance to their jobs—what Kirk deFord of Northwest Regional Education Laboratory (NWREL) calls "a drive-by in-service"—many teachers are now participating in longer sessions that focus on collaboration and improving student achievement. And as far as deFord, an associate of the nonprofit education corporation in Portland, OR, is concerned, it's about time. "Teachers who take a drive-by in-service know they won't be held accountable for what they learn, and often feel no special need to change the way they teach," he says.

During the 2002–2003 academic year, NWREL and nearby Lewis and Clark College launched an online school management course. Its participants—administrators and prospective administrators scattered throughout the large, rural eastern half of the state—met once in person at the beginning of the two-semester course, and then relied on conference calls, videoconferencing via the Internet, and e-mail messages to resolve some of their districts' thorniest management issues, such as how to better serve children with special needs and how to attract qualified professionals to teach math, science, and foreign languages.

Education vendors have also moved quickly to take advantage of NCLB's more stringent teaching requirements and its wealth of funding opportunities. Many of the professional development courses from vendors, such as Pearson, Classroom Connect, and Holt, Rinehart and Winston, now use streaming video—downloadable files that use RealPlayer, QuickTime, or the Windows Media Player format—to introduce or reinforce the subjects they teach. Others, including PLATO Learning and Atomic Learning, have also developed tutorials geared to educators' individual professional needs. "Everything's geared around [state] standards and kids' acquisition of those standards," says Donna Elmore, vice president of professional services at PLATO Learning and a former South Carolina school superintendent.

But Michael Simonson, a professor in the graduate school of education at Nova Southeastern University in North Miami Beach, FL, says educators need to be cautious when selecting those materials, because many of them are "repurposed from older video course materials," and may be "10 years old and out-of-date." As for the best person to evaluate those products, Simonson, Vandervelde, and Elmore think that's a no-brainer: in most schools, the library media specialist is the professional best suited for that task.

Walter Minkel is SLJ's technology editor.